Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday August 31, 2005 @10:04AM
from the little-bit-of-this-a-little-bit-of-that dept.

UltimaGuy writes "This article is an excellent comparison between the features of Apple Tiger and Windows Vista Beta 1. The point it raises - 'Windows Vista Beta 1 is a much-needed demonstration that Microsoft can still churn out valuable Windows releases, after years of doubt. For Mac OS X users, however, Windows Vista Beta 1 engenders a sense of déjà vu."

The thing is, until I can install OSX on my current Windows system IN PLACE OF windows, comparisons between Windows and OSX have no meaning precisely because I am required to buy new hardware to use OSX. Vista is a rip off of Tiger? Maybe, but until OSX appears on generic x86 platforms, OSX is not a competitor to Windows despite coming out with the features first.

I've not dug into the nuts and bolts of XP or Vista, but if Vista is making more extensive use of DirectX and hardware acceleration for graphical effects than XP that would make sense.

When XP was first released, there was still a very large # of PC's coming out that didn't have hardware acceleration on the video "card". If it's more common to have that today, then offloading from the CPU onto the GPU will garner at the very least an increase in perceived performance.

I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows XP, despite people saying I would

I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows 2000, despite people saying I would

I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows 98, despite people saying I would

I didnt *have* to buy new hardware for Windows 95, despite people saying I would

In short, everytime someone has said I would require new hardware for a Microsoft operating system release, I have had a perfectly usable system after upgrading to the new OS without buying hardware. Thats what makes me think I won't need to buy new hardware for Vista.

And no, Im not running XP on the same hardware I ran Windows 95 on:) My upgrades were not forced by Windows versions tho.

Right. You won't *have* to buy new hardware for Vista either, provided you don't intend to use many of Vista's features. This has been documented [eweek.com] several [digitalhomemag.com] times [itnews.com.au] already [smh.com.au].

I remember upgrading from Win3.11 to Win95. It was a 100 MHz computer with some 32 MB RAM.
The slowdown was immense, although I cannot really claim the system was unusable - only irritating.
A 386 with 8 MB of RAM (IIRC the stated minimum was 4) was disastrous; the woman who worked on that computer literally came to work, started the computer and went for a coffee - by the time she was back, the computer was just about ready for work.
It was a 15-floppy version of Windows, too... By all the Greek Pantheon, that was a slow and tedious install...

When i bought a new computer, a Duron 600 (it is the one I'm presently working on) with 128 MB of RAM (now upgraded to 256), Win98SE worked OK. A re-install here and a re-install there, but it worked. I guess it still does; haven't booted into Windows for almost a year.
When XP came around, I went to see how it worked. Then I compared the computer it was installed on with my computer (pun alert) and decided it was not worth it - it would take way too much disk space and memory. It's not quite the same as the 386 and Win95, but it is nevertheless a big deal - I work on a computer similar to mine in college - it has Win2k and is much slower than my computer running Gnome with quite a lot of bells and whistles. Now imagine XP... Gods know I did.

So no, I never *had* to buy new hardware for any of the new Windows versions, but all - except maybe Win98SE - have shown a steady increase in resource hogging compared to the previous version.

Not all of us can afford computers new enough to run the upgrades to our operating systems... Hell, if push came to shove, I couldn't even afford Windows (no, I don't own the copy on my computer - it's one of the reasons I run Linux, although practically no-one in Croatia really buys Windows they use at home. *Way* too expensive.) - when I bought this computer, although new, it was already a not-so-good middle-class model - a month or so later, the weakest processor widely available was Duron 700.

My next upgrade (coming soon, thanks to a quiz show a while ago) will not be forced by Windows, but my upgrade of Windows (should I choose to waste some disk space only for a few games and troubleshooting service for my friends) will undoubtedly coincide with my hardware upgrade. Care to guess why?

Microsoft isn't requiring you to upgrade your graphics card at all - if you want to use the Aero Glass theme, you'll need a more powerful card, but if you don't have one, you can run Aero or a classic Windows theme just as easily.

The DRM stuff will require an upgrade in order to function with new media formats, but given that no vendor is legally allowed to let the HD content run on current hardware, you can't pin that one on Microsoft. Additionally, since it will take a long while before a healthy numbe

Nope. But I've certainly done a lot of comparisons using middle of the road, but similar OS X and Windows Systems. For a very long time my desktop held two machines I used for very similar tasks, mostly using the same software. The PC had a little more RAM and a lot more Ghz, but all in all they were both middle of the road professional machines. You know what I found? Windows is faster at some things, OS X at others. For example, opening a folder with many items in it was faster in Windows. Opening applications was faster on the mac. Running Perl scripts and performing intensive text mapping in Adobe applications was much faster on the mac. Previewing images was faster in Windows, but it could not handle nearly as many types of images. The most important thing for me, however, was multitasking. Windows was just fine at running an application. It was a little slow running an application while several other applications sat idle. It sucked donkey balls when trying to run a dozen programs simultaneously or when trying to have multiple programs actually do things at the same time. I kind of like to tell an application to do something, then move on to another task. With Windows it sometimes took more than a minute just for focus to switch to another application and then doing anything was like working on a 386.

I use a lot of different OS's, but when comparing Windows to the mac, well Windows takes forever to accomplish tasks and can't handle many of the things I do every day. Right now I have about 15 applications running, including several web browsers, some Adobe apps, mail, terminals, calendar , graphics editor, chat client, word processor, XML editor, diagram layout app, etc. That just did not work for me on Windows. I had to be content with a terminal, layout app, and maybe one other application if I wanted it to be responsive enough to get anything done. I still use Windows for tasks where it is faster or better and for compatibility testing, but it just can't cut it as a general workstation OS.

you can turn off all the slow Finder animations," but no one at the Mac store has ever been able to demonstrate this to me.

This right here tells me you have never given OS X a try as a working OS. Pretty much anyone can figure this out in about 15 minutes. All of the whizbang animations, etc. are able to be turned on or off in the system preferences pane for that feature. Apple is offering a 30 day trial of mac minis right now. You can sign up at their website and they will ship you one. Try it for a month and if you don't like it, ship it back. It will cost you as much as it takes to ship it back. They are certainly not fast machines, but they are fine for most general purpose computing or to get a feel for the OS. Personally, I don't think I could ever give up plug-in system wide services (like spell checking, grammar checking, and translation for all text, everywhere) nor do I think I could give up the functional multitasking and real CLI.

"Slow Finder animations" is the biggest crock. I can't even click a stopwatch fast enough to time it, and it isn't as if your cursor is frozen or you can't go on to do the next thing. Command-Shift-N, Command-Delete - no animation, a folder appears, then disappears, all in less than a second.

Even if there was a real delay, I've wasted more time trying to get wireless networking going on a Windows machine than I've EVER used waiting for some icons to plot when opening a folder with lots of files. There are delays when doing that in Windows as well, so I don't know why you think that Mac OS X is any slower.

If Vista is anywhere close to as good as a Mac at configuring a network connection, it will be a vast improvement.

Have you ever compared the speed-feel of using a crappy XP machine (say my 1.3Ghz Pentium M laptop) to, oh, say a top-of-the-line OS X machine? The PC wins hands down, every time, in tests like "opening a folder with lots of files" and "launching an application."

I love the new features of OSX, but don't kid yourself. It's not getting faster because the Apple folks are working magic, they are fixing bloated/bugged code, and the OS is only now starting to run at the speeds it should have run at to begin with.

And to be fair, premature optimisation is the root of all evil. Windows has been "optimised" from the get go, with the downside being that adding things too it tended to result in hacks and cruft. I kind of appreciate the philosphy of aiming for a good architectu

But, even if you accept that Windows is attacked because it is ubiquitous--and not because it's an easy target--then OSX still is a safer bet, and OSX will remain a safer bet until it's saturation reaches 51%--if we're, again, assuming that market-share is directly correlated with exploited vulnerabilities. This of course means that OSX will remain a more secure system for the foreseeable future. This is what you pro-Windows guys don't seem to get, OSX is more secure than Windows right now, you'll spend less time farting around with malware.

As for applications, it depends on what you do, I for one use the iApps and FCP and consider the Windows equivalents to be anemic at best.

Finally, OSX is very easy to deal with, I don't get the odd dialog asking me if I want to launch a wizard every time I do something new and I don't have Outlook demanding attention. I have to deal with fewer patches and updates and I get some very cool extras like Automator that make my computing life a little easier. You should try OSX when you get the chance.

You raise a good point. Regardless of whether or not it really is more secure, there are fewer attacks on it right now, so use it until it's no longer more secure.

I guess I am a pro-Windows guy, but that's probably partially due to the fact that it's paid the bills for the past decade. Personally, I don't spend any time whatsoever messing around w/malware. I typically use Maxthon (uses IE engine) for browsing, Thunderbird for email, and run two apps for maintaning security - Avast (antivirus) and Syga

I'm not sure what you mean by 'proprietary everything' since OSX is based on FreeBSD, which is Open-Source and uses a whole host of open technologies underneath the general operating system. We can argue about pricing, but in many comparisons--especially equivalent systems (which is hard) Apple is often very close to competitors; Apple's Powerbooks are quite reasonably priced.

The wizard thing is just, in my mind, a fundemental problem. With Windows connecting to a wireless network requires a couple of dia

The choice for home users is usually either A) what they use at work, B) what Bob down the street uses, C) what their neighborhood geek told them to get, or D) what platform they can play the most games on.

The choice of most users is A) what the machine came with when they bought it. Most people don't have the foggiest clue what an operating system is.

Doubtful. The Windows/Mac ratio is what, about 17:1 or some such? With XP, Microsoft couldn't even get half the installed base upgraded within a year. And considering the percentage of users who have hardware that meets Longhorn's requirements, I'm gonna make a bold statement and say that half of all Windows users will NOT upgrade within the first week of release. So 1,000X+ comes down to something more like 8x, and I think even that is wildly optimistic. I predict it's gonna take a few months for Longhorn to achieve the market penetration of OS X. Of course it will surpass it, the much larger installed base guarantees that. But uptake of new releases is yet another area where Microsoft has lost a whole damn lot of momentum in recent years.

[no envelopes were harmed (or even discolored) in the making of these wild ass guesses]

I do agree with your main point. But I believe your math is a bit off.

Windows owns around a 95% marketshare and Macintosh has around a 1.9%, and Linux has around a 2%. Please note that I am talking client not server OS.

Now, I bet that way less than 10% of the Windows users will upgrade to Vista within the first month of release. So I do agree with your email in principle. The bad news for these users is that companies like Dell, HP and IBM will make Vista the default OS and that will drive Vista as the defacto standard within a couple of YEARS. Then after a year or so most large companies will standardize on it, and thus drive even more sales.

Now, having said that, it is my belief that Linux will continue to chew in to Microsoft's client market year after year and this will in a weird way also help Apple. It is my belief that when Linux hits around 10-15% marketshare the game will be over for Microsoft. At around 12% ALL companies will be forced to provide drivers and support and thus the core reasons for not using Linux starts to fade away. It is also my belief that it will take Linux far longer to reach 8% desktop market share than it will take it to go from 8 to 12%. Once the ball starts rolling it will be hard to stop it.

I say 10 to 12% because that is around the time management types start listening and reacting. A perfect example is Mozilla and Firefox. Quite a few companies around my area have started "fixing" their web applications because they didn't work with anything but IE. Well it took Mozilla to get enough traction for these companies to allocate resources to fix their applications. Trust me, NONE of those companies wanted to do this work. It took them time and time is money...

Market share is NOT the same thing as installed user-base! I've heard figures anywhere from 5-17% for mac installed user-base. Sure, Windows is a lot higher than mac, but 1000/1 is NOT realistic. More Apple stores are popping up all the time, the iPod is still on a roll, OS X is moving to Intel (another psychological barrier broken there), viruses and malware continue to proliferate for Windows, OS X continues to improve in Windows interoperability and enterprise features are rapidly becoming available.

As I said in reply to someone else, the number was an exaggeration. However, I see a lot of people make the assumption that because a lot of companies did not upgrade from win2k to XP, they won't upgrade to vista.Simply, it has more to doing with the corporate hardware aging cycle than to a repudiation of xp. If you go back to the year 2000, a lot of companies just upgraded hardware and software because of the Y2K fears. XP came out a year later so it is not unreasonable to assume xp came out too early in t

I understand that this was a joke, but I'm gonna reply helpfully anyway:

I would venture a guess that Duke Nukem Forever would have similar hardware requirements to that of Unreal Tournament 2007 [unrealtournament2007.com] because it will (supposibly) run on the Unreal 3 engine [unrealtechnology.com]. Game and graphics freaks should definitly check out the Unreal 3 Technology [unrealtechnology.com] page

GoogleOS is likly writen (if it even exists) as a server OS for Google's clusters, not for a desktop/gaming pc OS.So a word of advice,. don't hold your breath that it will be able to get you any good frags (or that it would even let you see them for that matter) in CS.

Disregard the parent post. The author is a "known" Linux shill. She'll often post comments bashing MS and anything that paints Linux in a bad light. She'll frequently use ad hominem attacks to attempt to discredit articles posted by those who don't agree with her viewpoints.

How can you debate a point when you must rely on ad hominem?

Despite the fact that her posts are horribly inaccurate she whores for a lot of karma by pandering to the Linux zealots on/. And who is to blame her... after all her post was modded "Informative".

The fact that you can even compare a beta version of Windows Vista to a final release of Apple's operating systems speaks volumes about their qualities. Microsoft truly trumps the hacker shop that is Apple.

The fact that you can even compare a beta version of Windows Vista to a final release of Apple's operating systems speaks volumes about their qualities. Microsoft truly trumps the hacker shop that is Apple.

Vista for x64 will release at the same time as Vista x86 32 bit. Like Windows XP x64, Vista x64 will be fully 64-bit capable with a compatibility layer for 32-bit stuff.

There will probably be some stipulations for driver signing on Vista that the vendors must support both platforms. Which is good, because it really doesn't take too much for fix drivers to work on x86-64. Most Linux distributions for AMD64 have had the full compliment of drivers for years.

This is not exactly true. When an AMD64 (IA32e/EMT64) is executing in long mode, the cpu does offer a compatibility mode, but it is up to the operating system to set the necessary descriptor tables and initiate the 32-bit task. Likewise, the OS has to be aware so that it can thunk 32-bit library values (change from 64 to 32-bit on the call and from 32 to 64-bit on the return). So a fair amount of OS support is required to run 32-bit native code on a 64-bit native OS. Is it a lot of code? Not really, bu

The problem isn't whether or not Apple's operating system beats Windows at features A, B, and C. The problem is that Macintosh has never been accepted on corporate desktops, and that's where Microsoft's next version of Windows will be unstoppable. Outside of certain very specific industries, MacOS has never had a presence in the office setting.

The home computer market is the same story. MacOS has its fans and that gives it something like 10% of the home market, but Windows (in any incarnation) has always been more popular. It's never been simply about "OS xyz has feature abc while the competition doesn't". It's always been about getting the operating systems preinstalled on hardware. Now MacOS will be delivered on x86, and that ought to be interesting. But if customers can only buy MacOS from one vendor, that means that they won't have very much choice in hardware selection.

In the grand scheme of things, though, Apple is the largest single hardware vendor, and that's where they excel. Their software is excellent, but it's always been the hardware that keeps them financially viable.

I wouldn't say MacOS has never had a presence in the office setting. It might be true to say it never had a presence in the office setting for MacOS X, but I believe Monsanto (back before all the mergers/spinoffs) they used MacOS. I know because my father would bring home his computer (a color Macintosh II!) every now and then just to let me play on it... and I even remember his old computer, the Mac SE (which we still have somewhere). They didn't switch to MS Windows until around MacOS 7/8.

Seriously - this is complete and utter rubbish. Try using 'Machines running windows are still significantly ahead in numbers compared to Apple computers'. A large number of graphics/film companies work on Apple computers, because that was the industry standard ten, five, years ago - and in a way this is a mirror of the home environment, where the evening-out of platforms and their performances fail to have significant effect on the number of X Y or Z machines, because of the status quo.

I wouldn't be so sure about Vista being unstoppable on corporate desktops.

We are a small shop, (500 PCs) and we just this summer upgraded to XP. (Once the SP2 was released.)

After all the work we've put into cleaning up spyware, a couple of virus infections, updating and configuring patches, there's no thinking about switching to anything from a (relatively) stable XP SP2.

However, you should also realize that, for Microsoft, size of market is a competitive advantage. Features like instant desktop search are great for any operating system, but they only truly "matter" when the mainstream market is using them. And today, that only happens with Windows and its user base of several hundred million active users.

What do I care how many users are out there with some kind of desktop search. A million, a hundred million or just two. I don't care. I don't care if you use it or how you use it.
The only thing that matters with regard to desktop search is if I can use it and if it finds my stuff.

how is this insightful? under what circumstances?Poster's point is valid whether you "care" about it or not.

Consumer software is an amalgam of relatively incompatible data types and proprietary platforms. Critical mass in the user base is thus very important to the success of a company's software, again, whether you "care" about it or not.

A poor analogy: I'm posting in english, (and I could be wrong) but you'll probably reply in english in order to ensure that your data is properly conveyed. Thus you're adh

The poster is insightful by simply pointing out that for an individual user, a desktop search feature is useful it if finds things he's looking for. The "critical mass" aspect of the ability to search for and index, say, Word documents is the mass of Word documents, not the number of people using the search technology.

Microsoft's real threat is google.

This gets said a lot, but I'm not convinced it's true, and the fact that Microsoft is paranoid about it doesn't change my skepticism -- Microsoft is paranoid about everyone. Google does not have a desktop platform, they have an advertising service.

As John Gruber put it recently [daringfireball.net], "What makes something a platform is that you can't take it away without the stuff that's built on it falling down." You can port programs from Windows, but you can't just move them onto another platform. They need Windows. What has Google produced that meets that litmus test? Changing your web site from using Google Search or Google Maps to Yahoo's equivalents is changing a few lines of code somewhere; Google Mail and Google Talk rely on the fact that moving to/from them is trivial; Google's few actual software products are for Windows.

Google makes virtually all of their money from advertising, either by driving you to their web site or by getting their ads in front of you on other web sites. They're really good at what they do, they've got a bunch of best-in-class web applications, but for the foreseeable future, they're competing with Yahoo! and other portal/search providers. They may be competing with Microsoft's MSN and Hotmail divisions, but not on the desktop.

What is the big deal about desktop searching, anyway? Are people REALLY having so much trouble finding files on their own computer?

The short answer: yes.

The longer answer: the issue isn't limited to "finding files on their own computer," although it's easy to misinterpret it that way. Usually, finding an individual file isn't that hard, assuming you already know what the file is. What if...

...you're looking for something which is in one of hundreds of similarly named files, all in the same director

Having read it just before it was posted on Slashdot, I do also believe that it is a very good review from someone who once was the poster boy for Microsoft.

It would appear that after looking at Tiger, Paul's faith in Microsoft has been shaken and these-days he is more critical of what they do and how they implement things.

Hopefully Slashdot will post part 2 as it does make interesting reading.

On a side note: Apple is now offering a Mac Mini [apple.com] testdrive via its online store, allowing prospective customers to purchase a mini and then return it for a full refund within thirty days if they don't like it.

Good news is that they're not charging a restocking fee. Bad news is that you'll have to pay for the shipping if you send it back, the offer only applies to stock minis (not custom jobs) and it's not available outside of the USA.

Can't get everything I suppose. However still might be worth a look, especially since it gives people the opportunity of a risk free (in terms of your credit card) chance to try a completely different operating system.

After 20 years of SunOS/Solaris on my desktop I'm having a little explore of OSX. Found a flimsy excuse for a Mac Mini and a 1G
stick of RAM, bought a couple of wallpaper strippers to open the
case and off I go. So I'm unusual in being a motivated Mac
switcher whose background is not Windows. Three days, and
I'm enjoying it at lot (although I got frustrated with the
limitations of the Date and Time dialogue and hacked/etc/ntp.conf by hand...)

Inconsistencies in the Mac UI? The most obvious one is that
you double click to launch applications from the finder but
single click them from the dock. Double click isn't always
safe, because sometimes it'll launch two copies.

Another is that some configuration dialogs have `OK'
or similar buttons, while others take effect immediately, while
others take effect when they are dismissed.

These are hardly earth-shattering, and as a long-term
GUI-distruster I'm very impressed (hell, I'm using `Mail' while
since 1988 I've used MH or mutt). But it's not perfect: it's just
very, very good.

Icons generally are double clicked whereas toolbar buttons are not. The dock is a toolbar/launcher rather than a collection of icons. The same thing goes for the "sidebar" which is also a toolbar/shelf.

That convention is generally accepted on most OSes throughout history.

Inconsistencies in the Mac UI? The most obvious one is that you double click to launch applications from the finder but single click them from the dock. Double click isn't always safe, because sometimes it'll launch two copies.

Under the Mac OS Finder you can't launch 2 copies of anything, no matter how many times you click on the Dock. Every click just keeps activating the same single instance of the application. Give it a try, you can click once, twice, ten times. You'll never get more than one instance of an application to launch.

The only easy way to launch an application multiple times under the Mac OS Finder is to make a separate copy of the application on your hard drive and launch that. If you don't want to do that then there are ways through the terminal that you can launch multiple instances of an application from one copy on the disk but honestly it's almost never needed. This is a feature of Mac OS by the way, not a limitation. Mac OS is set up for one instance of an application being able to handle the jobs of multiple instances of applications, to simplify the launching and handling of apps.

Another is that some configuration dialogs have `OK' or similar buttons, while others take effect immediately, while others take effect when they are dismissed.

One of the main ideas of the Mac OS UI is that there are hardly any buttons that say "OK". They are pretty much all verbs that describe what is going to happen when you press the button. For example in save dialogs the buttons are usually "Cancel" and "Save". For the most part you always know what action will be taken when you press a button. This is true of all the programs written by Apple and most third party developers follow this UI convention also. I'm willing to bet any confusion in buttons that you see is a third party application, not an Apple one.

It's not a matter of working with you or against you, it's a matter of it's a different paradigm so you may have to work a little differently.

Under Windows you open up a new instance of a program when you want to open a new task such as browsing a website. You can then do stuff in each different instance.

Under Mac OS you open a new window (using the menu option File -> New or the keystroke command-N) instead of running a new instance of the program. The new window works almost exactly the same as a new instance of the program.

The main difference is resource usage. A single program with 5 windows open is most likely going to use up less memory and processor time than 5 programs with 1 window open each. There is also the benefits of organization. Generally when you are working in a program you want to view all the documents of that program easily. With Mac OS if you activate a program all of the program's documents come to the front. You can also activate each document individually if you want to.

So yes, it makes perfect sense. Just remember that if you are switching desktops not everything will be a complete one-to-one translation. There are many different ways of doing things and whenever you change you need to be flexible enough to change a little. Who knows, the changes might even make you MORE efficient once you get used to them.

"less memory and processor time"The idea of splitting up into separate "programs" (processes) is that each is isolated by hardware from others. So an error (bug) will disturb one but not others.

The OS itself (and, I believe that MAC OS X core does this as well) shares code pages anyway. The incremental cost of a new "program" is then the data used, and the scheduling (which is typically insignificant).

The ONLY thing is that it becomes difficult to share material (documents) BETWEEN the processes (because of

A single menubar at the top of the screen which changes based on what window is active. That made some sense in 1985, because people were generally only using one application at a time. If I'm running five applications at once, switching between them, it breaks the immersion and the desktop metaphor.

However, if you get accustomed to the fact that the single menu bar is infinitely tall (you can't miss it by going to high), you start to appreciate it as being faster to zoom through the options of an unfamiliar app. This is the one thing that drives me nuts about Windows. Hitting the menus requires me to either work the keyboard (which is logically similar to the one-key commands prevalent on OSX), or be pretty accurate clicker with the mouse.

On a large desktop (standard resolution for me is 1600 x 1200 on a 21" Trinitron), hitting those menus requires a fair amount of precision. And yes, I use XP/2000 at the office, and primarily 98 at home. The family machine runs OSX.

One thing that really caught me off guard (other than the bizarre inconsistencies in tiger that I havn't noticed) is the comment reguarding spotlight's searching as you type being counter-productive? I have a Powerbook G4 (so obviously not the most powerful mac available currently), and I have noticed absolutely no lag in performance when typing in a spotlight search. Actually you can often see the document you need in spotlight as you type, so by finding it before you even finish typing your search query wouldn't you actually be slightly (although unnoticably) more productive? Unless of course the moving text in the spotlight box is just so confusing and hypnotizing that he cannot continue typing.

"It's not that hidden, it's right at the top of the Get Info window; and it's not just for documents, it's for *any* file or folder."

I saw a few comments similar to the one you were answering here, and my take is that all of the features he considers hard to find may only be so if one has only ever used Windows, and cannot get out of the windows mindset. I have had my notebook for about a year (and I have used many oses including dos, every version of windows to date, linux, irix, etc), and I find most features and ways of organization in os x to be more intuitive than any other os I have used.

Oh yea, I also agree about the origin of spotlight. He clearly says that he has no clue wether features like spotlight were originally intended, or came from microsoft? First of all, has apple historically ever worried about microsofts features validating their own ideas before including them? He certainly leaves the possibility open that apple somehow copied the idea for spotlight from microsoft, but it doesn't seem logical. For spotlight to work so well, and be so bug free (I have not noticed problems anyway) I doubt that they said "hey that sounds cool, we'll do it too".

Perhaps in another article he will talk about microsoft adding a new dashboard-like feature, so apple must have stolen it from microsoft. Give me a break.

I look foward to dual-booting both OS's off the same intel/amd system for the Best of Both Worlds.

If the gaming on OSX ever gets up to par with the windows systems, then it would be my OS of choice. It's no where near as fast as the Windows system is for this. And that's assuming the game you want to play is even ported to OSX.

Though the drawback to this is of course siding with Steve Jobs. *cries*

The point it raises - 'Windows Vista Beta 1 is a much-needed demonstration that Microsoft can still churn out valuable Windows releases, after years of doubt.

Really? I thought XP was fairly useful, if only an incremental upgrade to 2k.

Meanwhile, Vista is panning out to be nothing but XP with alpha transparency and a lot more DRM. As a network admin, I see no reason at all to upgrade. As a gamer, I see no reason at all to upgrade; Avalon/WGF are being ported to XP. As a user, there's incentive not to upgrade, because it costs more, it's more of a hassle, and it doesn't allow me to do anything I can't do on XP, already.

You forgot my favorite feature of Vista, transactional NTFS. NTFS has always been atomic, but the ability to group changes to a group of multiple files into a transaction that can be rolled back or commited as a single atomic unit will make software deployments and patching infinitely easier. Start installing a piece of software and an error occurs? Just rollback the entire install and not a trace of the install attempt will remain.

I don't know if transactional NTFS will require the WinFS service pack yet, but I know it will be an absolute godsend to IT departments.

I have been running Tiger since the day it came out, and I must say that I am not all that impressed by it.

Spotlight is really slow on my G4 Powerbook (1GB RAM), it can take 8 seconds to find what I am looking for. I don't see why it should take so long if everything is pre-indexed.

Dashboard isn't terribly useful either, its a nice gimmick, but I find myself using it very infrequently. The selection of Widgets is symptomatic of this, I mean, who really needs a countdown timer to the next episode of Battlestar Galactica just one keypress away at any moment?

Both Spotlight and Dashboard have gained reputations for slowing overall machine performance too.

I have yet to find a use for Automator, and from what I can see from the rather uninspiring selection of Automator Actions people have created, neither has anyone else. Its a nice idea, but in practice not a very useful one.

I don't know that I agree. My sisters both use the dashboard alot. They are not super tech saavy (or any more than girls growing up in an engineer family would be), but they find it useful.

I still like Tiger better than XP, even if work and research dictated that I use XP and Cygwin (it is my last IBM-comp... I am convinced of that now). Features that I love having in Tiger and wish were in XP:

F9 -> this is better than the way XP/Windows sorts your open windows... much better

Networking. Aside from some glitches in the built in FTP stuff, Mac networking is alot easier. Hell, if my little sisters can figure out how to set up a network, it is easy.

Darwin console. Ok I am a unix nerd at heart and Cygwin doesn't always do it for me.

Sharing the top bar. That makes software more standard. You always know where to go for stuff.

Did i mention the F9 view... stupid windows.

...

This guy is a fan boy for MS and I will give him credit: he gives Tiger something of a fair shake... kind of. Some of his claims are a bit crazy. Does he actually expect us to believe that MS had the idea for desktop search before Google, etc? I call shenanigans! He claims that the screenshot in here [winsupersite.com]
and a 30 second Bill Gates clip Bill Gates clip [winsupersite.com] serve as evidence of MS and desktop search. Yeah right!

Windows had a search, and a crappy one at that. Search is not a new idea, exactly. But Google and others did it differently because the MS way was broken. And despite his review, Windows desktop search is NOT as good as Google (it builds a bigger cache and you can't pick where it goes...grumble). WinFS is/sounds like XML based meta data for files and database related ideas for searching on that meta data. This does not imply "building an index" as much as it implies a hashing schema for file structures. I.e. certain meta data allowing lookups based on hash values for the file.

WinFS is going to be slower... precaching is what makes Google Desktop fast.

But like I said, because Longhorn is so far from release and OS X is four gens deep, these are not even good comparos. Also consider that Darwin runs on multiple CPUs well. With the multi-core processors on the horizon, this is really the future of computing. I think/hope Longhorn/Vista is a disaster and helps to break the MS stranglehold a bit.

Mac users are picky, and that's good; but I think your assessment is inaccurate.

Spotlight is really slow on my G4 Powerbook (1GB RAM), it can take 8 seconds to find what I am looking for. I don't see why it should take so long if everything is pre-indexed.

Are you actually counting out 8 seconds? That seems awfully long. I have two 80 GB drives, and I usually get complete results in 2-3 seconds. I'm using it more and more to find invoices, contact information, and email.

Oh, and the Spotlight search box in "open" dialog boxes is just the greatest thing ever. It saves me so much time just to search for the file I want and have it appear instantly!

Dashboard isn't terribly useful either, its a nice gimmick, but I find myself using it very infrequently.

It's finding its uses. It's very good as a data aggregator, sort of an analog for raw information to what RSS is for news. Using the stupidest examples of user-made widgets to represent the essence of the technology is silly.

Both Spotlight and Dashboard have gained reputations for slowing overall machine performance too.

Sure, among the fools-who-make-crap-up demographic. Spotlight indexing is a kernel call that takes virtually no resources and doesn't slow the machine at all.

I have yet to find a use for Automator, and from what I can see from the rather uninspiring selection of Automator Actions people have created, neither has anyone else.

Sure, uncreative people won't think of using it when they should, and they'll say it has no use.

I find I use it quite frequently. It can take care of almost any repetitive task. Today, I set up an Automator applet that grabs photos from iPhoto, renames them sequentially, resizes them, and puts them in another photo for uploading to eBay. A tedious process that would take 10 minutes on Windows takes about 10 seconds with OS X and Automator. In my humble opinion, it's one of the most remarkable technologies ever added to an OS, and it's almost infinitely extendible with Applescript and custom actions.

Honestly, Vista isn't going to come close to any of this; but I expect Leopard to bring wonderful improvements.

1. Instant Calculator. I don't want to add the Calculator to my dock. I can simply hit F12.

2. I hate auto-spell checkers. So I usually have them off. Thus, when I want to check the spelling of a word, I love popping open the Dictionary widget. Quick. Easy. And faster than opening up Word or enabling spell check.

3. I regularly work with a distributor in another time zone. I keep my world clock set to their time zone. For me, it's faster to press

You may have found something in 5 seconds, my point is that typically it takes longer, and even 5 seconds is ridiculous. If Google can search the entire internet in a few milliseconds, then why can't Spotlight search one hard disk in less than 5 seconds? I suspect you will find that the ratio of Google's processing power relative to the amount of stuff they index is much more of a challenge than that posed by a single modern computer searching a single modern hard disk.

Paul missed the fact that Tiger supports 256 x 256 icons as an extension to the existing icon data format.

Icon Services in Tiger has been extended to support icons that are 256 x 256 pixel in size. To support these larger icons, a new icon type selector has been added for you to use in calls to SetIconFamilyData and GetIconFamilyData. The selector is kIconServices256PixelDataARGB and is defined in IconStorage.h.

With SetIconFamilyData, a non-premultiplied 256x256 ARGB bitmap should be provided as input and IconServices will compress it before storing it in the ICNS container.

With GetIconFamilyData an uncompressed raw 256x256 ARGB bitmap is returned. The only difference is that the returned image contains the alpha channel where for the previously supported icon sizes there are 2 separate selectors: one for the mask and one for the data.

Unlike with Spotlight, Vista Beta 1's searches are not instantaneous, but this is by design and is arguably a better choice.

Quite arguably. Say I'm looking for "Programming in C", which may or may not actually be named that on my disc (although I know it'll have program-something in its name).

Tiger:Pro... Final cut pro shows up...gr... progressive insurance...am... Programming in C! There it is. This is all at one constant typing speed and watching the results, no waiting or stopping, instant feedback.

Vista:You have two options:Pro + entertoo many results, try againProgram + enterprogram files.... look down the list.. there it is!

or

Programming + enterhmmm... I don't see it... tryProgram + enter... look through the list...oh! the name was mispelled in the filename and was actually "programing" of course

And at this point I've made how many searches to equal the instant feedback of Tiger? Instant feedback is the whole point of having desktop search! Otherwise it's only a slight improvement over what they've had for ages.

Too, I'd like to remind you that Windows Vista is only in Beta 1. Lots of things are going to change, and many, many features will be added by Beta 2 and beyond. This stands in sharp contrast to Apple's approach with Tiger. If you go back and look at the WWDC 2004 keynote video, you'll see Steve Jobs demo virtually every single major new feature in Tiger. A year later, when the product actually shipped, little had changed and nothing major was added. This isn't how Microsoft works. Beta 1 is a minor subset of the overall functionality we're going to see in the final Windows Vista product.

So what he's saying here is that Apple figured out what features they wanted, then took years to refine them.

Vs. Microsoft, which has a beta out now but will cram a lot of stuff in over the next several months and let users test it in early releases.

I read something similar into that statement: Apple decided on their features, implemented them, TESTED them, and released a fairly stable product. MS, however, throws all kinds of shit in at the last minute, and for that we get Zotob and friends.

I thought the whole point of calling something BETA was that this is what you'll release once the major bugs are fixed. In this case, they're treating it like a "feature beta," which from a security standpoint is a nightmare. What ever happened to "test what you fly and fly what you test"?

I'm sort of amazed that every mention of Vista or Mac OS in the press focuses entirely on GUI widgets and desktop search (the feature of the month, apparently)- and in comparing these two things between Windows and Mac OS X.

Frankly, I am a fan of both of these OSes (and others), but comparing the two in this way is silly, because their target audiences and development focuses are wildly different.

Sure Vista is going to include some updated UI elements, and this will inevitably generate comparisons with Mac OS, but I believe that for the Windows folks updating the UI is a tiny frilly prize at the end of a much more substantial journey. (I think) Most of the work going into Vista is not related to wow-ing an individual user with the splashy out of box experience (though there will be some of this). Instead, most of the work going on is targeted at corporate IT installations of tens of thousands of machines and the associated management costs. Things like new deployment options, services hardening, re-engineering to provide functionality while reducing attack surface, expanding on multiple layers of management frameworks, expanding on policy enforcement, network access protection, using AES for more and more crypto functions, etc, etc, etc... In some cases Vista will represent a radical advance in the plumbing of the Windows platform.

I guess it is understandable that a reviewer wouldn't be interested in these more important things, focusing entirely on UI widgets, but it is unfortunate that a project as substantial as Vista, one which will likely affect all of us, is only represented in the press with the thought "Now includes desktop search! Sort of like Mac OS!"

Vista, to the end user, will probably look a lot like Windows XP with a bit of a UI refresh, but there's a whole lot going on under the scenes that only developers will appreciate.

Win32 has been how you write Windows software since Windows 95 (and that was based on Win16) - from the very first version of Windows to today, you're creating HWNDs and sending messages to them, and calling CreateFile when you want a file and so on.

But now Vista is delivering on a whole lot of strategies at the same time.

Avalon / Xaml replaces how you create user interfaces.

Indigo replaces how you do communications.

WinFS (which will probably get rolled into Vista at some point, now that it's gone from vaporware to betaware) replaces a lot of how you manage your data.

The rest of the.NET Framework (which will finally come with the OS so you can depend on it being there, assuming you're targetting Vista) replaces just about everything else.

It probably won't be for another 5 years or so, when developers can start thinking about depending on this stuff, that things will really change, but for Windows developers, it is a pretty big change.

The Mac of course has made these kinds of "forget everything you know and start over with this new technology" changes many times. It's the courage to do this that has kept the Mac alive, and I think shows that Microsoft is on the right track.

The really annoying thing is that both companies are radically changing how you develop software for their platforms, and they're completely different.

As a developer, will I ever get to use Avalon in a real app? I'd guess not. Making a portability abstraction for Avalon and Xaml is a lot different than wrapping a button or a listbox with a generic API. Every platform has buttons and listboxes; no other platform has a Xaml equivalent yet (XUL is a bit of Xaml but they're not really directly comparable).

I can't believe that I got tricked into reading another lame Paul Thurrott article. He's got a real knack for picking interesting subjects, writing weak articles, then getting them widely promoted via Slashdot, etc. It's gotten to the point where when I see his name I wish that I could reach into my web browser and take back the nickle that the banner ad view made him.

OK, so the argument here is that one of Vista's big advantages over Tiger is that it ships with pre-made Virtual Folders. I can think of lots of reasons why Apple didn't do that.

Apple's fervently pursuing switchers, users who are new to the Mac. Try explaining the difference between folders and smart folders to someone who's not, as people often say, "good with computers." Tell them something like, "well, OK, you see, the file's there, but it's not really there. It's actually in a real folder somewhere else." You're likely to get a glazed expression from that one, and possibly an existential argument about "is anything really where it is?"

The moral: smart folders are an advanced feature. People who want them will know how to find them. People who don't understand them won't have to worry about them.

Again, from TFA:

In Tiger, there is no easy or obvious way to edit meta data for the documents and other data files you create, and you typically have to rely on document processing applications (such as Microsoft Word) to add and edit this information.

Spotlight relies on Spotlight Importers, little bundles of code that know how to read files and return metadata about them. More often than not, the importers are written by the original application designer, who should know better than anyone what bits of data are most important in a document. Apple's implicit position is that metadata should be either derived from the document on its own, or that metadata should be provided in some manner by the creating application (which the importer can then retrieve).

Again, should people have to care what "metadata" is? There are lots of ways the programs themselves can gather all the metadata you'd care about. Standard info, such as the file's author and what-not, can easily be provided automatically by the program. That's the way it should be, because programs can automatically add relevant metadata that improves searches without the user ever having to do a thing. Plus, there's a matter of confidence. If Vista's got a great big box for me to enter metadata, should I take that to mean that there's a good chance Vista doesn't really know how to index my files? If that's the case, then forget about it. I'm not going to add metadata to every document I've ever written just so I can find it.

The moral of the story is this: having a wide arsenal of tools is great. But many users don't know how to use them, don't need them, and don't much care to learn. Vista seems to favor forcing users to learn how to use these new features. A forcing function is a good idea sometimes, but forcing users to use features that just complicate their experience is foolishness. The crux of Thurott's complaints against Tiger is that it's not complicated enough. There aren't enough exposed features. I've learned that in UI design, the more buttons you give someone to push, the better the chance is that they'll pick the wrong one, and the better the chance they'll blame you for it. And they'll be right.

"They never would have been announced during 2004 had Microsoft not first revealed that it was making the feature a standard feature of the next Windows."

This is patently false; Apple hired Dominic Giampaolo [wikipedia.org], developer of BeFS (which was specifically developed to have the sort of 'fast search' that is finally showing up in mainstream operating systems), in February of 2002. The intent was clear, back in 2002, that it was Apple's intent to bring the innovations of BeFS to OS X, a year before Microsoft announced the feature.

Phrasing the chain of events as "When Microsoft announced [it] in October 2003, the race began." is ridiculous. Apple effectively announced the plan 18 months prior, and even then it was clear that it was too late to make it into 10.2, the 10.3 release was unlikely, and that therefore... it would show up in 10.4. Just like it did.

More damning, though, is that Microsoft has announced this feature a number of times, every time they've announced that a future OS (starting with NT 5, IIRC) would feature a database-driven filesystem. Why didn't anyone else jump on getting the feature first then, rather than this time? I'll tell you why: it's a hard feature that took a lot of time to work on, and every one had been working on it the whole time.

The real problem here, though, is that I bet Paul Thurrott doesn't know any of this. All he knows is, Spotlight Search was announced when 10.4 was announced, which was after Microsoft announced it. And without looking at it any closer, he decided he knew the whole story and that he could speak authoritatively on the subject. I can't be bothered to read the rest of the article if it has the same empty authoritative voice.

He claims that the race for development was on after Microsoft announced integrated desktop search functionality in Longhorn in October 2003. Then he goes on to say about these products "They would never have been announced in 2004 had Microsoft not first revealed that it was making the feature a standard feature of the next Windows." And then he goes on to say "If you go back and look at the WWDC 2004 keynote video, you'll see Steve Jobs demo virtually every single major new feature in Tiger, A year later, when the product actually shipped, little had changed and nothing major was added."

What an interesting claim! Let's say for the sake of argument that he is right. OK?

What he actually says is that in the time from October 2003 till May 2004 - basically 6 months, and I guess Apple did not get the sourcecode from Microsoft; Apple did not only figure out the more or less complete UI of Spotlight, but also implemented a kernel level, system wide search engine almost to perfection. 6 months!

What did Microsoft do in these 6 months? - and I guess they must have had some code and prototypes for this great idea since they'd decided to make it an integral part of their OS? Dunno!

Mr Paul Thurrott writer, the only thing we have seen from Microsoft, and it is soon 18 months since WWDC 2004, is a half baked beta. According to yourself Apple did the job almost to perfection in 6 months. Go figure!

Optional point: Slip in a patent filing, just before Apple gets around to do it. Or better on Apple announcement day.

Wicked tongues said some time ago that the reason why WinFS was pulled from Vista, was because Microsoft did not have anyone they could copy the implementation from. Now that they are about to figure out the combination of HFS+ and Spotlight, it is safe to put it back on the table again. But not in Vista, in case they have not quite figured out the logic by ship in November 2006.

Well, I'd say it is not really fair. What needs to be said is "our current OS is still better even then your new OS that won't even be out for another year or two. " By the time Vista is released Apple's current offering will probably be another few years ahead of it and While Windows users are drooling over the "new" features, OS X users will be running a system comparable to what MS will release a few years after that.

After reading about Vista, and then about what features are actually going to be into it I was pretty annoyed to discover most of the core features are either weak copies of OS X features or ways to lock-in the user even more. They are adding in DRM galore, trying to kill openGL and move everyone to their proprietary DirectX, trying to kill PDF and move everyone to their proprietary alternative, etc., etc. Too bad most purchasers are so uninformed. I wonder if they will be able to buy the EU to avoid getting beaten for all this continued monopoly abuse and move to closed, proprietary formats that contradict EU purchasing policies and further illegally extend MS's monopoly.

PDF is an open, published standard with multiple open and closed source implementations of both readers and writers. PDF sucks on Windows right now mostly because most people view PDFs with the slow and bloated Acrobat reader plug-in running with IE and neither IE nor Windows in general has good end-to-end multitasking. When most people think of PDFs they think of clicking on a link and then waiting a few minutes while their computer is unusable for the thing to load. Viewing PDFs on Linux or OS X on the

Considering how many times the.DOC file format has changed, can you still open up.doc files you made in Word 1.0 with Word 2k3? The answer is YES, so the closed format and not being able to view it in 10 years is mute. You don't think MS will support their own formats 10 years from now?

First, just because they "support" one format going forward does not mean they "support" all of them. There are plenty of deprecated Microsoft file formats that are no longer readable. Second, have you ever opened a re

Considering the promises Microsoft's made about Vista have changed as much as our reasons for going to war in Iraq, I take anything about Vista with a grain of salt. What happened to WinFS? Or Monad? While those are both "beneath the hood" features, a real shell and a better file system than NTFS would have been nice. M$ has axed both of those.I just switched from Windows to Mac. My Mac Mini easily outperforms my Athlon XP 2800 in most tasks, and I can't seem to stop myself from playing with my comput

it still does it better than windows for a mere $1,000 more than your silly little white box."

Wow you can buy a small form factor PC for -$500 dollars? Sign me up for a billion of them. Oh, wait, you didn't mean to include minis. OK, just send me a few million of those free consumer grade laptops and a couple of those $500 professional laptops with the firewire, multiple monitor support, comprehensive software package etc.

Or maybe you can do a little research and stop spreading that ridiculous FUD about how expensive Apple machines are. Apple does not offer as many price points and form factors, but they are pretty competitive if you compare them on the included hardware and software vs. price.

And this crap about the feature only being valid when exposed to a wide audience? So the OS don't work if Microsoft doesn't sell 200 million copies? WTF?

Now there's a scary thought... maybe Microsoft will refuse to activate anybody's copy if they don't sell at least 200 million copies. I mean it's bad enough that you have to ask MS for permission to use the software you paid for, but what would you do if they said 'no'?